The full description of the bug is in the linked issue above, but the short version is:
Our CreatePrivateMessageReport
endpoint had a bug that would allow anyone, not just the recipient, to create a report, and then receive the details about private messages.
This allowed anyone to iterate over ids, creating thousands of reports in order to receive details about private messages.
Since those reports are visible to admins, it would be easy to discover if someone was abusing this, and luckily we haven’t heard of anyone doing so on production instances (so far).
If you haven’t, please be sure to upgrade to at least 0.19.1
for the fix.
Many thanks to @Nothing4You for finding this one.
Those didn’t completely break federation, they just had some issues with a few services besides lemmy. They’re addressed now, but federation compatibility will always be an ongoing task as new services get added and existing ones change their activitypub responses.
Happy to be past that indeed